DDP DOJ is basically perfect

[Exy]

• Nimble ship movement
• Quite approachable, but reveals new dimensions of difficulty as you spend more time with it
• Sensibly coloured projectiles, items and effects make the screen easily readable, even in busy sections
• Bullet patterns are demanding without being gimmicky or discursive
• Doesn't really ever leave you languishing with an impractical weapon
• No fanservice
• Has a giant bee

I just wish there was more of it. Say, 30 stages. That'd be neat.

Are there any other games people can recommend with styles close to DOJ? (Besides Ketsui and other DDP games, I mean.)

[Shepardus]

• Muddy prerenders that make everything look like dirt
• Rank system that makes hypers more lethal than helpful on bosses and thus feel unsatisfying to inexperienced players
• Rank system that requires you to drive up rank to get bullets to an entertaining speed - stage 5 is a slowdown-ridden trudge through molasses at low rank
• Wave after wave of enemies that shoot amorphous clouds of bullets that provide no entertainment trying to read them because they're literally solid walls and you're supposed to execute a cutback (or memorize the spawn location and kill them before they fire anything)
• Quite approachable at first, but reveals new ways to restrict you and your playstyle as you spend more time with it, to the point where killing an enemy with laser instead of shot can mess up your hyper cancel timing and get you killed or lose an unpredictable amount of points
• Scoring system that may as well be a random number generator for inexperienced players without a strict route
• TLB made of grade-A bullcrap
• Powerup system that's forgettable at best (SDOJ got rid of powerups for good reason) and infuriating at worst (powering up re-fires the laser and can thus break your chain, most notably on the 1-2 midboss)
• Has fanservice in the sense that everything good about it outside of stage 4 was taken from Dodonpachi

[trap15]

^^^ Shep with the trap15-post

[Exy]

I don't know why so many people dislike the prerenders tbh. I think they're just fine. Dodonpachi looks sharper in parts, but it has its own visual shortcomings, and DOJ is by no means ugly.

I don't play for score, so a few of the things you mention are lost on me, sorry. :o) But I'll take your word for it on those points, I guess.

Wave after wave of enemies that shoot amorphous clouds of bullets that provide no entertainment trying to read them because they're literally solid walls and you're supposed to execute a cutback (or memorize the spawn location and kill them before they fire anything)

You mean like the section right after the third stage midboss? Maybe the second half of the game lays those kind of patterns on a bit too heavily, but in general I like them. They provide a bit of variety.

everything good about it outside of stage 4 was taken from Dodonpachi

Honestly, I don't see that.

[Bananamatic]

• Muddy prerenders that make everything look like dirt
• Rank system that makes hypers more lethal than helpful on bosses and thus feel unsatisfying to inexperienced players
• Rank system that requires you to drive up rank to get bullets to an entertaining speed - stage 5 is a slowdown-ridden trudge through molasses at low rank
• Wave after wave of enemies that shoot amorphous clouds of bullets that provide no entertainment trying to read them because they're literally solid walls and you're supposed to execute a cutback (or memorize the spawn location and kill them before they fire anything)
• Quite approachable at first, but reveals new ways to restrict you and your playstyle as you spend more time with it, to the point where killing an enemy with laser instead of shot can mess up your hyper cancel timing and get you killed or lose an unpredictable amount of points
• Scoring system that may as well be a random number generator for inexperienced players without a strict route
• TLB made of grade-A bullcrap
• Powerup system that's forgettable at best (SDOJ got rid of powerups for good reason) and infuriating at worst (powering up re-fires the laser and can thus break your chain, most notably on the 1-2 midboss)
• Has fanservice in the sense that everything good about it outside of stage 4 was taken from Dodonpachi

wtf i hate cave now

[Van_Artic]

• No fanservice

ew no thanks

[MaXXX]

Bullet patterns are demanding without being gimmicky or discursive

I hope for your sake that isn't a slight against Ketsui

[qmish]

Bad prerenders are in Deathsmiles, and SDOJ looks too polished/casual (aka smartphone games, visually). DOJ is allright, especially on CRT.

no fanservice

I think you meant "fanservice done well" instead.

[Blinge]

discursive

wat

[Squire Grooktook]

The pre-renders in DOJ are done well enough that I didn't know they were pre-renders at first. I still think DDP's sprite art is a thousand times crisper and more attractive looking on a drawing level, but DOJ pulls by on the strength of its gloomy aesthetic and the strong execution thereof.

I like the game. Nice simple but strong bullet patterns on bosses and level layouts feel strong. I hate chaining though.

9/10 it's okay

[chempop]

I don't play for score

And you wouldn't want to.

I have only gotten about 100mil from the first loop ignoring score altogether. Was it still fun? Yeah I enjoy DDP series for survival.
But to start a thread about a game being perfect, yet you don't have any experience with the scoring (primary focus to the genre), well you are going to have a pretty tough time convincing anyone.

Welcome to the forum btw

[Eaglet]

BL second loop is really fun for survival play.
I have a lot of fun playing it casually.

[iconoclast]

I think Daioujou has plenty of flaws. It's still better than practically every game in existence, but it has too many issues for me to rank it as #1 or #2.

* Way too much randomness. Every boss besides Hibachi is a random piece of shit, and the second half of stage 4 (from the midboss on) is hugely luck dependent.
* Illogical ship balance. Type B being both slower and having a larger hitbox makes no sense whatsoever. There's really no reason to use it over Type A. This was improved in Black Label, at least.

I guess that's about it. It's really just the massive amount of random elements that drag the game down a bit. A little bit of randomness is fine (or good, even), but DOJ goes way too far with it and makes luck a much bigger part of the equation than it should be.

Now Futari God Mode is a perfectly designed game. Possibly 1.5 Maniac, too.

[qmish]

While i really suck at DOJ (even in 2-loop version) which leads me to hating it from time to time, for me DOJ became more like an iconic shmup that symbolize both bullethell subgenre and Cave's most active, golden period.

[Illyrian]

• Nimble ship movement
• Quite approachable, but reveals new dimensions of difficulty as you spend more time with it
• Sensibly coloured projectiles, items and effects make the screen easily readable, even in busy sections
• Bullet patterns are demanding without being gimmicky or discursive
• Doesn't really ever leave you languishing with an impractical weapon
• No fanservice
• Has a giant bee

I just wish there was more of it. Say, 30 stages. That'd be neat.

Are there any other games people can recommend with styles close to DOJ? (Besides Ketsui and other DDP games, I mean.)

It's nothing compared to Ketsui.

[KAI]

Ibara is basically perfect

Fixed that for you.

[qmish]

Also DFK isn't meh

[Aldnox]

I think both DOJ and Ketsui are two of the best shmups ever tbh.

[maximo310]

I think Shep summed it up the best.

Plus, scoring and chaining are pretty strict (especially in white label), so its really easy to lose a ton of points if you screw up at one spot. Dodonpachi does seem more approachable than DOJ just for that reason alone.

[Special World]

What I really appreciate about it is that, on a fundamental level at least, the scoring system is what you'd be doing anyways. It's a natural extension of the mechanics--okay, I want to spray popcorn enemies and laser tougher enemies. Got it. I know Dodonpachi is also like this, but DOJ takes that design and makes it even tighter, I feel. It's a very natural system.

So many Cave games are like, "Alright so you gotta do this so you can do that but even though you THINK you should do this absolutely DO NOT do that because it actually effects this so really you want to do this instead." Which is great for those games. But that's why Dodonpachi has its own little niche of excellence, at least until DFK came along and Cave decided to complicate their one straightforward shooter.

Took me a long time to warm up to DOJ, but it's definitely one of my favorites now. Very tightly designed, with very memorable stages. And it has a cohesive aesthetic as well, which Cave seems to have lost with more recent games.

[copy-paster]

DDP DOJ Black Label is basically perfect

Fixed.

Well, the chaining in BL is not as strict as the original game, but meh I don't even score.

Are there any other games people can recommend with styles close to DOJ? (Besides Ketsui and other DDP games, I mean.)

Perhaps Mushihimesama and Espgaluda series is the decent choice, both are created by DDP developer.

[Cagar]

-

[To Far Away Times]

Not a fan of chaining, but as a survival game, DOJ is amazing.

[Jeneki]

I just wish there was more of it. Say, 30 stages. That'd be neat.

Dayum, imagine going for the second loop in that lol. You could always play the entire series back-to-back if you want to feel like a true DON.

[ciox]

DOJ's main attraction is the game's basic feeling, something about the way bullets and the player ship move feels better than other games, even Ketsui which was a year later on the same hardware feels slightly off in comparison to DOJ, not that I don't love it for other reasons.
Feelwise it still irritates me by having some way too big bullets with a pixel sized hitbox, wouldn't be a problem but whenever games do that they also eventually make you hug those bullets down to the hitbox to survive smaller bullets charging at you while your instincts are screaming at you not to do it, the big bullets never really helped me visibility wise.

Blue skies debate aside, DOJ is about the last time you had really super detailed backgrounds with CAVE I think, Ketsui right after still had really nice ones with some better colors but still dropped a lot of detail and had an even more prerendered look, later than that you get tons of looping the same scenery and none of the same insane detail in individual setpieces
http://shmuplations.com/wp-content/uplo ... tsui01.jpg vague comparison of doj and ketsui st1 and their level of prerendered-ness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vNuz4OEDJk#t=13m15s some parts in doj where the detail is through the roof are the aftermaths of blowing up the giant cannons in st4, but there's many others

About drawbacks like getting walled-in and strict chaining, those are kind of DDP staples and they feel easier to deal with in DOJ without being too easy either, kind of in the right place.
I really find chaining to be a lot easier than in the original DDP, I mean, why do hypers even exist? They're both a panic button and a "auto-chain for a while" button if you make an effort to wiggle around. And trying to escape walling-in is a lot easier if you have a smaller hitbox, you can bs your way out there.


The chaining does feel cool if you can do it (I can do stage 1 at least) but it suffers a lot from being a typical enemy chaining system with a really small timer and few special setups/enemies, your "crucial chain-keeping targets" end up being hidden in a huge sea of identical enemies and this makes it really hard to remember what you're supposed to shoot and when as there's nothing remarkable from enemy to enemy, a chaining system like in Ikaruga or Bakraid that's based around special enemies that stand out and setpieces is a lot superior, at least as far as helping you remember what you're supposed to be doing.


Lastly, the references to Ikaruga in DOJ are really cool, so that always adds a little bit to my enjoyment in playing this game.

[Shepardus]

What are the Ikaruga references in DOJ? I don't think I noticed those.

[trap15]

DOJ is about the last time you had really super detailed backgrounds with CAVE I think

??? I can think of a good number of CV1000 games with backgrounds having a LOT more detail (or at the very least looking a lot better) than DOJ. I don't remember the link, but someone had rips of a lot of CAVE game backgrounds and some of them are incredibly pretty and detailed. Whereas DOJs are easily ignored and drab and boring.

[ratikal]

* Way too much randomness. Every boss besides Hibachi is a random piece of shit, and the second half of stage 4 (from the midboss on) is hugely luck dependent.

I was going to ask what bosses then remembered.

* Stage 2 boss first phase is pretty much all random
* Stage 3 boss final phase has a pattern that can go either left or right in the final phase
* Stage 4 boss second phase can fuck you over if going for score

I can't think of other randomness in the Stage 1 and 5, am I missing anything? Also, are the bosses pretty much static in Death Label?

* Illogical ship balance. Type B being both slower and having a larger hitbox makes no sense whatsoever. There's really no reason to use it over Type A. This was improved in Black Label, at least.

I thought in BL they just swapped hit boxes with Type A. Did they fix both of them?

[iconoclast]

The stage 1 boss's first and fifth attack (where it spins its side pods) are random. Using a hyper makes the fifth attack somewhat dangerous in the first loop, and its risky to try and dodge the first attack in the second loop without hypering or filling your gauge for a bullet cancel. The stage 5 boss is the worst. Its second and third attacks are random and dangerous in both loops, and its first attack is random and dangerous in the second loop, even with a well timed bullet cancel. The stage 3 and 4 bosses are also worse in the second loop, and of course everyone hypers and bombs the 2-2 boss because it's impossible to dodge its patterns with any consistency. I don't know about Death Label.

In BL, they gave Type A a larger hitbox and Type B a smaller one. Type A is still better, but at least Type B has something going for it.

[AxelMill]

So me having as much trouble with the first boss's final phase as DDP's second boss's isn't all that weird?
That's a relief.